Around the time of Peter Mandelson’s appointment as the UK’s ambassador to Washington in late 2024, Nigel Farage, our possible next prime minister, said that while he “might disagree with Mandelson on his politics” he was “a very intelligent man”, who would be a good choice for the job. If the Tories raised objections at the time, they are not exactly seared to this day on the collective memory. As one senior Labour figure put it to me on Sunday: “They all thought it was a very smart political move back then. Now they are all full of this righteous indignation.”
Certainly, in MPs’ defence, we know much more now than we did then about Mandelson’s enduring links with Jeffery Epstein. And thanks to the Guardian’s extraordinary revelation last week, which rekindled this crisis and turned it into one about the entire workings of government, we discovered that Mandelson actually failed the official Foreign Office vetting job for the job but was appointed nonetheless.
